Covering Climate Now deputy director Andrew McCormick spoke with Ajit Niranjan, a freelance climate correspondent and contributor to Deutsche Welle.
How did you become interested in climate journalism? Was there a specific moment when you came to feel passionate about climate change?
I actually wasn’t always someone who clicked on climate stories. I was interested in politics and business, and until I became a climate journalist, I sort of had this mentality of “Oh, well, I’m vegetarian, so I’m already doing my bit.”
I graduated from university in 2017, and afterwards, I took up a traineeship at Deutsche Welle, which is Germany’s international public broadcaster. In addition to writing, they taught me how to do TV and radio. When I finished as a trainee, I was thrown onto DW’s environment team. DW needed native English speakers to discuss climate on TV, and that led to me putting a lot of pressure on myself to really understand climate change; obviously, if I was going to be in front of a live camera, I didn’t want to say anything stupid.
What does better solutions coverage look like to you?
The key thing with solutions—and you’ll hear solutions journalism advocates and experts talk about this, too—is to be critical about them. Here’s what’s good about the solution; here’s what might be bad about it; and here’s how we could make it better. That’s a very easy framework to adopt for covering solutions.
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